Little Do We Know(13)

“I’m just wondering how you made this so quickly?”

“Well, for one, it’s my job.” He started listing the reasons using his fingers. “Two, your dad, my boss, wants all the videos done by Friday so we can send them around to the local churches and ask them to play them during Sunday services. And three.” He stopped. “Never mind. Three’s not important.”

I gave him a look. “What’s three?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Well, I didn’t really care much before, but I do now,” I joked.

His mouth turned up at the corners.

“Fine. Three. I have no life. After you guys leave for the day I come up to this pathetic man-cave and spend hours alone up here. If it wasn’t for that mini fridge over there, I might starve or die of thirst. I work until midnight, go home and sleep, and come back and start into it again. How do you think I redesigned the entire SonRise site in, like, four days?”

“Well, I like it. And I’m not just saying that because you don’t have a life and I feel sorry for you.” I looked at him. “It’s good.”

“You think?”

“Yeah,” I said. But he must have heard the inflection in my voice, because his eyebrows pinched together as he looked at me.

“But?” Aaron asked.

“No,” I said. “No but.”

“I thought I heard a but.”

“It’s nothing.” I hesitated to say anything. I knew he was following Dad’s direction, going after the theater and dance kids exactly the way he was supposed to. “Both videos are inspiring and all, but I guess I’m wondering how you’re going to reach everyone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve got your churchy people and you’ve got your Hollywood wannabes, but that’s a pretty small portion of the students here. Think about what my dad said during chapel today. Most of the kids that came here as freshmen felt…lost in some way. Something was missing from their lives, and the people at Covenant filled the gap. We became the friend group they couldn’t find or the family that splintered apart. Lots of the kids here are the ones who didn’t feel like they had anywhere else to go.”

“And neither one of these videos is reaching out to them.”

“Not really.”

Aaron crossed his arms and studied the screen.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to be critical. I know how hard you’ve worked.”

He shook his head. “Not at all. This is good.” He grabbed the can of Coke sitting next to his keyboard and took a big sip. “So how do we get to the others?”

“I don’t know.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

I felt the anger rise into my chest again, and I wanted to kick myself for forgetting I was mad at him. For a minute there, I’d been acting the way I’d always acted around Aaron. But everything with him was different now that I knew what Dad had done. I stood and reached for my backpack.

Aaron set his Coke down and adjusted his cap on his head, his gaze still fixed on the monitor. “I’ll make a third one,” he blurted.

“How? I thought everything had to be done by Friday.”

“No life, remember?” He raised an eyebrow. “The filming and editing aren’t the problem. I just need an idea and script.”

The room got quiet again. Was he was waiting for me to come up with something? Because if that was the case, he was sadly mistaken. In a roundabout way, I’d paid his salary. I wasn’t about to do his job for him, too.

But then one of the photos on the monitor caught my eye. It was a picture of Kaitlyn Caziarti, standing at the pulpit, sharing her testimony.

Kaitlyn had transferred a few months into her junior year after she was the subject of a vicious rumor that spread around her old high school. She didn’t share the details, but she talked about how hard those months had been, when no one believed her side of the story, not even the friends she’d known since elementary school. Her parents kept telling her it would die down, but when it only got worse, they finally agreed to let her change schools.

She talked about how everyone at Covenant had been so kind and inclusive, welcoming her right away, treating her like she belonged there. I remembered cynically thinking that I’d seen plenty of vicious rumors spread across our campus, too, and that she probably shouldn’t let her guard down so completely. But then I’d glanced over at Dad, beaming as if he was proud of the world he’d built for her.

In the car on the way home that day, he’d told me that Kaitlyn, and all the kids like her, were the reason he accepted the job of running Covenant all those years ago. “They need us,” he’d said matter-of-factly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure this school is always around for them.” I’d admired him for that.

Now I felt a pang of guilt for being so angry at him. He was still that same person. Even if I disagreed with his methods, his heart was in the right place. His heart was always in the right place.

“Have you seen a testimonial since you came to Covenant?” I asked Aaron.

“Not yet. Why?”

“People give them during Monday Chapel sometimes. They talk about their lives before they came here. The mistakes they made. The bad things that happened to them. They talk about how Covenant helped them turn their lives around. They always remind me what I love about this place. Maybe you could get a few of them to let you interview them on camera. You could piece the stories together, add in some music. I bet it would be really powerful.”